When we were kids, our parents used medical terminology about our bodies. I don’t remember whether it was always that way: I remember when I was very young, about four, watching a TV programme with nobody else around and then proudly bursting into the room declaring that I had learned the “proper” names for genitalia. Whether that memory reflects reality or not, I don’t know.
One day, when I was six– I can place it quite well, because I remember the classroom– I was allowed to choose what reading books I was reading. And I picked out a book called The Body Book, which at the time looked quite fascinating. I remember my teacher wrinkling up her nose in thought as to whether I should be allowed to take a book with naked people on the cover home, and my mother telling her it was all right.
Anyway, so I devoured this book. It had a lot of information in it about such interesting things as emotions and death, but then I got to the page about sex. In case you didn’t bother to look, it explains that boys and girls have “baby-making bits”. A boy’s “baby-making bits” are named as “a penis”. However, not only is the vagina the only part of a woman’s equipment whose existence is acknowledged, but the book even affirms that its name is “a baby-making hole”. Being a knowledge-thirsty kind of kid, I soaked up this information and forgot that I had previously been aware of any other words.
Now, a few months later, it happened that we were doing some Disney songs in the school choir, including the song Twitterpated from Bambi. When we were waiting by the front door getting ready to go to school one morning, my brother (a year younger than me) got bored and decided to pass the time by parodying the song. He sang:
Things begin to happen when a boy meets girl,
The boy puts his penis in the girl’s vulva.
(Somehow he managed to get the second line into the metre. I don’t think we learned about scansion at school.)
Anyway, I turned on him and said, “He doesn’t! He doesn’t!”
My mother fixed a steely eye upon me. “Really, Thomas?” she said. “And what does he do?”
“He puts his penis in the girl’s *baby-making hole*,” I said proudly.
To her credit, my mother kept a straight face.
–Submitted by Thomas
It is better for them to learn the A-Z of sex rather than wait for porn or their friends to teach them what they are missing. Now if they miss out on the birth control bit, STD bits how they will ever exercise caution. I believe that the more they know about it the more responsible they will be before they make any decision. Sexual Education is not going to push a child towards sex. Teens are naturally curious about sex anyway in any shape or form. They will go for it regardless of the fact that they receive a sexual education or not. Would it not be better for them to learn about it before they go on to take that step?
via Sex Ed Controversy « Lawanai Sparashawe Translation: Lost my marbles big time.
Nigerians need to let go of that moral crap, sex is not bad; So why do Nigerians demonize it?
Your mother cannot even give you proper sex education as a yound adolescent, rather she says ‘ if you go close to a boy or if a boy should touch you , you’ll get pregnant’ .
BULLCRAP!!!!! Hey wonderful mother, why don’t you say ‘ my girl, if you have sex without protection with a young man you will get pregnant’ .
Isn’t that real and honest compared to making your child believe she’s some reincarnation of Virgin Mary that will concieve by some holy apparition.
Why don’t you tell your child, because believe me , she already knows the whole 9 yards, I dare say at age 12 she knows half of what you knew at age 23.
via Ttlolla’s Mind: Lets Talk Sex.
It’s that time. My boys are growing up, they’re realizing things. And I found out last night most of what they know is false. What is not false is only half truths and misinformation. For home schooled kids, I’m surprised about how much they hear from other kids. So we decided it’s time for a little formal sex education…
The boys are different. They’re very vocal about it all. Have no qualms about asking me any questions either. And I try to answer them as honestly as possible. My problem is how much should I tell them? So I found a couple good books written for their age. Specific to boys, which was very hard to find. Most puberty books are geared towards girls. We’ll read the books together, then tackle any questions they may have. This is important because they need to know the facts, and also because I’m tired of them using vulgar terminology to describe things.
Right now, they’re reading and cracking jokes. But they’re reading it, and that’s the important thing.
via Just Living.
I just read the story about a girl telling her family members about a vibrating doodle pen and I had to share my own story about the things.
I had my first orgasms with one of those pens as a young teen! I got it for Christmas a few years earlier, as did all of my younger cousins, but I noticed that the adults were snickering and knew there was something naughty about them. I don’t remember what persuaded me to slip it into my underwear one night, but I remember making quite a habit out of it.
I knew that girls were supposed to masturbate by putting their fingers inside themselves, but I was scared to put anything inside me because I knew that I could hurt myself if I stuck my fingers into my other orifices (or so I was told). I was especially frightened when I first began to get aroused and found myself getting wet, because somehow in all of my sex-ed classes (including a pretty detailed sex-ed book for teens!), no one had ever mentioned that women get wet when they are aroused and I thought I was sick. I had been told that if anything strange came out of there, I should tell my mother or ask to go to the doctor. I wouldn’t get my period for a couple more years yet.
It never occurred to me to rub my clitoris with my fingers, and even when I got older and tried using my fingers inside myself, I didn’t feel anything special like I thought I was supposed to feel. But the pen worked. I used to steal the batteries out of all my old toys to power the thing. When I burned out the motor after a couple years of frequent use, I rode my bike to all the stores nearby that might carry another one, because I was too young to buy a real vibrator. Heaven forbid a sixteen year old girl be allowed to masturbate!
Hopefully by the time I am a parent I will figure out a graceful, caring way to give my teenage daughters their own safe vibrators without totally mortifying them.
–Submitted by M.
The following story lay dormant in my memory for many years. It, along with other experiences, explains a lot of things about how I relate to my family. I have recounted this recollection in the third person. That is just how it came out, and who am I to argue with my muse?
***
“Jon showed me something strange today.”
The little girl, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, addresses her family as they drive in the car together. Bellies filled with eggrolls, wonton soup, fried rice and the like, they are motoring home from the local Chinese buffet in Dad’s trusty old Oldsmobile Delta 88.
Dad, a solidly built man with a blond thatch of curly hair atop his large head, is in the front seat, driving. Petite, dark-haired little Mom is riding shotgun, though the little girl wouldn’t learn that term for another five or six years.
In the back, the little girl, little in stature as well as age, sits behind her Dad, while her teenage brother sits behind their Mom. All was customary.
“What was it, honey?” Mom asks.
“It was this vibrating pen. He said he got it from the dollar store.”
Lanky framed Brother begins to giggle.
“Yeah, I bet it was a pen,” he chokes out between guffaws, that mocking, know-it-all tone all teenage boys use in his voice.
“No, no, it really was. Beverly looked at it. She said it had four different colours and that her little brother had one.” The little girl valiantly defends her story, wanting to convey that if a little boy from a Fundamentalist Christian household had this mysterious toy, then it must be okay. It couldn’t be whatever Brother was thinking it was.
Brother keeps giggling… Mom joins in.
“What…what’s so funny? It really was a pen.”
The little girl is starting to tear up, as she is wont to do when she is confused. Dad remains silent, as he is wont to do when he doesn’t want to get involved. Brother and Mom continue to laugh.
A child’s toy that has adult implications. A child’s story that isn’t taken seriously.
What the family doesn’t know, what the family can never learn, is that when Jon, one of the “big boys” (at sixteen or seventeen years) said to the little girl that morning:
“Robin, hold out your hand. I want to show you something.” That when he had said that, she had been fearful, fearful in a way she only half understood, of what he would show her. Holding out her hand, reluctantly, but with fascination, to feel something round, and long and hard, but blessedly buzzing and plastic.
The Delta 88 (a 1985 model) pulls into the driveway, and a normal family gets out. Yet at least one member of the family isn’t the same as she was when she left for the coveted treat of a trip to the Chinese buffet. She has learned subtly, from her usually loving mother’s laughter, that there are some stories she should keep to herself.
Submitted by RM
I have Asperger syndrome. It’s a lifelong condition, but I was only diagnosed as an adult. It’s only now that I can look back at the way I learned about sex as a child and as a teenager that I can see how it made things difficult. One particular way this happens is the need to order one’s life with rules, and not to be able to understand when they should not apply, as others might.
I know my parents must have had The Talk with me at some point, but I retain only one memory: my father reading a sentence from a book saying, “the penis becomes hard and filled with blood.” I responded with disgust at the phrasing. I was young enough at the time that no other memories remain: having had the one discussion, there were never any more.
The Talk presumably focused on penis-in-vagina sex. It’s true that everyone needs to learn about that, but it would have no practical relevance to me until my mid-twenties. About the far more topical issue of masturbation, I learned nothing. Nor was much useful information forthcoming from school sex ed; the TV programmes we were shown explained only that “a boy may hold his penis and get a tingling sensation. A girl may get a similar tingling sensation by stroking the front of her vulva.”
But at the age of about ten, I discovered masturbation independently: I had my own name for it and rules about how to do it, and I thought I was the only person in the world who knew how to do it, or I’d surely have heard about it before then. So for a few years, I masturbated happily with no regrets. Meanwhile, my parents took me to church every Sunday, and I was trying to pray and read the Bible. One day I came across the line in the Book of Revelation which describes heaven– “Outside the gates are the murderers, the idolaters, the sexually immoral…” I realised clearly that what I had been doing was something to do with sex. And a terrified voice in my head asked, “Is that *me*?”
For the next six or seven years I had no peace. If lusting after other people was sinful, it had to go: I made myself stop fantasizing. If sex before marriage was sinful, and masturbation was a kind of sex, it had to go. That wasn’t so easy: I put dozens of rules into place and none of them worked. I tried giving it up permanently, and failed every few days, hating myself more each time. I tried throwing dice or coins when I was horny, so that if God didn’t want me to do it, he would have a way to stop me. I tried praying for wet dreams every night, to no avail. I tried only masturbating on Fridays, as a stepping stone to stopping entirely, but I *lived* for those Fridays.
In short, I spent most of my teenage years in the certain knowledge that I was an evil person, and that part of my very self, my sexuality, was inevitably going to send me to hell. And I don’t know how I could have been loosed from the trap. I wanted to talk to someone about what was troubling me, but I had nobody except my long-suffering diary. I would have been mortified to talk with my parents about it, I didn’t have any teachers I could raise the issue with, I had no friends at school to speak of, and though I read everything in the library I could get my hands on, nothing would reassure me as to the morality of masturbating. Maybe if someone had raised the issue at the beginning, or maybe if I’d had someone from the start that I could talk over any problem with, things would have been better. I don’t know.
I knew I liked girls when I was in junior high, or even younger. But because I still liked boys, I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know there was a such a thing as “bisexual,” that I didn’t have to choose one or the other forever and ever.
I finally realized that somewhere in high school, and though I admitted my attraction to women, I very commonly said that I couldn’t see myself dating one.
At 18, as a weird, strategic way out of an argument with my mother, I blurted out “Oh yeah? Well, I’m bisexual!”
Her reaction? “But, I don’t want you to be!!”
She was more worried about my father, who is an ordained Southern Baptist minister (ooooh) and advised me not to tell him unless he just absolutely needed to know.
A year later, I met a girl. We were friends at first, but that turned into a year of on again/off again sex. At some point during that time, my father became aware of what was going on. At the end of that year, we started actually dating.
In less than a month, we’re having our 10-year anniversary. And she loves to remind me that I swore I would never seriously date a woman. The joke is most DEFINITELY on me.
So Thursday I have to give my fifteen year old cousin the “sex talk.”
I have to talk to her about sex because no one else will.
Not her mother, my Aunt, who believes you shouldn’t discuss those things. Not my mother, who barely even knows how to discuss sex and sexuality with me.
I have to to talk to her about sex so she doesn’t go through what I did in my early teens. I have to talk to her about sex so she knows how to protect herself — from an unwanted pregnancy, from an STI — and what to do in case either occurs.
I have to talk to her about sex because she needs to know what is right, what is wrong, in terms of being comfortable and not allowing anyone to go past her limits. That sex is not for making someone else happy, or because someone else wants you too. That sex is pleasurable, and can be a wonderful experience, when you are completely comfortable and aware of what you are doing. That being a sexual being is nothing to be ashamed of.
I have to tell her what no one told me, and what I had to learn for myself.
Any suggestions on what else I can say to her?
I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, to propose that the socially acknowledged terms for sexual orientation leave a lot to be desired. I’m a woman and on the Kinsey scale (which I consider far more user-friendly) I would fall somewhere in the range of a 2. It’s taken me a while to get there and understand what that means for me.
Only in the last few months has the memory surfaced of the first I thought I might like girls. I remember very distinctly standing in the enclosed back porch of my cousin’s house. I was, perhaps, seven or eight and we were taking a brief break before foraging back into the pool. She, six months my junior, had always been a bit of a bully, but I tried to make due with my lone playmate. Being an only child with overprotective parents lent me to very few excursions outside the house, so I knew to enjoy the time I had while I had it.
Somehow it came to me in our conversation that day that I might like girls. I didn’t understand the social ramifications of the information, I hadn’t been given the ‘gays burn in hell’ speech yet, I only knew that, for some reason, I sort of liked girls the same way I liked the freckle-faced boy at school. I shared this information with her and she, giggling and wide-eyed, accepted it with no more issue than had I told her I sneaked an extra cookie before dinner. At least, that’s what I thought.
Later that afternoon I decided to exact my new-found power of using the telephone on my own. We took the cordless phone from its holder in the kitchen and dialed the number of my aforementioned freckle-faced crush. I don’t remember what we talked about (what does one talk about on the phone at that age?), but I remember the absolute shot of panic that ran through me when she snatched the phone and declared, “I’m going to tell him what you told me! I’m going to tell him you like girls!”
I somehow managed to talk her out of it, and I’m not beyond wondering if I actually grabbed the phone out of her hands and hung up on him. I know there was a brief period of begging, of desperation, but she never did say anything and I never spoke of my vague interests again.
I liked boys well enough and, as single digits turned to double and upward, I tended toward boys almost exclusively. In fact, I don’t remember the thought of girls crossing my mind for several years after that. I can only guess I must have severely pushed the information away. During those years I also came to understand that God thought same-sex intimacy was abhorrent, and that those engaging in sexual immorality would be permanently cast out. Between you and me, looking back now, I think Paul was just bitter he wasn’t getting any.
In the mid-late years of puberty I came to the realization that the idea of sex with a woman was not only interesting to me, but desirable in the right circumstances. I realized I was watching women more than men when I was out in public. I didn’t know what to make of it, I was a little afraid of it. I remember driving home, on the interstate south of Richmond with my mother, and telling her that I thought I might like girls too. I came out and said, “I think I might be bisexual. I sort of..like…girls?”
She gave me an odd sort of look from the driver’s seat and laughed, “No you don’t! You wouldn’t want to kiss a woman, would you? Gross!” This, followed by another sort of finial laugh was enough shut me up entirely.
Since then, I’ve shared the information with only two people: my best friend (who doesn’t care, particularly given I’ve never been attracted to her), and my male partner. He is a solid 3 now, perhaps a leaning 4 on the Kinsey scale. He had predominantly (nearly exclusively) male partners before we found each other and, for some reason, we fell in love. We work well together, we have a great sex life, and when I told him about my interest in women he laughed and said, “Fantastic. Now we can really look at people together.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever have sex with a woman. If our relationship continues as we both foresee it doing (that is, marriage and children), I have no interest of bringing other partners into the picture. It may be that I quietly admire from the sidelines and enact fantasies on my own or with him when the mood strikes.
I know this for sure, though: whatever gender preferences or interests our children have, we will never, ever, laugh at them.
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